Richard Stallman, industry activist and founder of the Free Software Foundation has - once again - relinquished his role as maintainer of the phenomenally successful GNU Extensible, Customizable, Display Editor (Emacs). The news was slipped out on the Emacs developers' forum and Stallman explained his reasons in a later interview.

It's really a shame that GNU doesn't get more of the credit for the complete systems like Fedora and Ubuntu. Linux itself is a very large kernel - it comprises about 45MB of code according to kernel.org - but things like GCC, Glibc, Gnome etc etc comprise FAR more of those systems.

One can see it that way too but well...What would you do with a distro with only GNU software on it? F.ex. GNOME doesn't belong to GNU as far as I know, and I kinda think all the other software too which don't belong to GNU actually comprise a bigger part of the distro than the included GNU software. As such, should it be called GNOME/Linux, or KDE/Linux, or something similar? Sure, the whole userland wouldn't be possible without GNU software, but neither would any of the modern desktop environments without non-GNU software.

In the modern times a Linux distro without useable userland is more or less as useless to any average user as a Linux distro without useable and modern DE. In that sense they are both equally important. And don't forget all the other software..

As such I just find nitpicking about calling it Linux instead of GNU/Linux rather irritating.